


The Battles Won ~ by Amanda C.

by AngelBookofDaysModerator



Category: Angel: the Series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Alternate Universe - Future, Angel Book of Days Challenge, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-05-17
Updated: 2004-05-17
Packaged: 2017-10-31 10:13:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,078
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/342875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AngelBookofDaysModerator/pseuds/AngelBookofDaysModerator
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written by Mandy C. Posted on the author's behalf by the Angel Book of Days Moderator.</p><p>Timeline ~ Through "Not Fade Away" and AU from that point. All is explained within the story. This takes place some twelve years in the future.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Battles Won ~ by Amanda C.

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Fairfax](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Fairfax).



_So we walked along the mending walls  
Laid beneath the tortured talls  
We talked about things to come  
Talked about the battles won  
He said I think it's gonna freeze this year  
I said I gotta get away from here_

Los Angeles January 2006

The suit has been replaced by worn jeans and a leather jacket. His back is to the door. That surprises her-he'd never struck her as the reckless type.

Then, it had been a long time.

Wesley turns his body towards her, but his eyes are fixed somewhere a little to her left and miles away. "You're too late," he says, and his voice echoes around the room, more gravelly than she remembers.

She observes the wreckage they're standing in: smashed furniture, broken glass, and blood. "Looks like it." She approaches him carefully. "What happened, Wesley?"

"Not sure," he says thoughtfully. "Perhaps the world ended."

Looking at him, Buffy has a sneaking suspicion that he wouldn't notice if it did.

"You know why I'm here, don't you?" she asks. He doesn't respond, and the silence that settles over the shattered room is thick enough to choke on. She speaks to keep the quiet from drowning her. "I'm supposed to make you feel better, I think. I'm supposed to tell you that it gets better, and that I understand."

Wesley finally makes eye contact. "You understand _nothing,_ " he says, and he seems to age twenty years in as many seconds. She doesn't remember his eyes looking like that: icy blue and so empty. _Maybe it was the glasses_.

She debates between indulgence and honesty and finally settles for sarcasm, because that's the only way she really knows how to interact with this man. "No, I have no idea what it's like to have your friends pull you out of your happy afterlife so that you can fight more demons and save the world a couple more times. That's _never_ happened to me before."

"My afterlife was far from happy," he says calmly, "and the very few friends I have did not pull me out of it to save the world, they did it because they didn't want to pay someone to translate prophecies. I don't suppose that _has_ happened to you, actually."

His cynical interpretation of the truth isn't a response for which Buffy is prepared. She sits down on a wooden barrel that had been knocked onto its side. It shudders beneath her, rolling back and forth.

"You've gotten old," she says, not really intending it as an insult.

"Yes, well, life will do that to you." He pauses, rethinks. "Or, apparently, death."

She tries for upbeat. "Well, you know what they say."

"What's that?" His face is utterly expressionless.

"Only the good die young."

* * * * *

2007

The late afternoon sunlight filters in through the leaves of thickly clustered birch trees, tracing patterns across the damp grass. Wesley thinks that there could be no better place to lay a friend's body.

Except, of course, no place at all. He would have infinitely preferred to never bury this particular friend.

He and Buffy are the only mourners left-are, in fact, the only mourners at all. Wesley knows it ought to make him upset, that a man who did as much good and saved as many people as Angel did should be so alone in death. In some ways, though, he is envious, because Angel at least has two. Wesley, who will likely suffer for many more years, will have no one. Which, he knows, is precisely what he deserves.

Neither one of them wants to speak, but Wesley has been to enough funerals to know that there are certain condolences which must be exchanged. "I'm sorry. I know how you two felt about each other."

Buffy, who has been to enough funerals to know his words by heart, responds, "I don't think we could've worked things out anyway."

"Perhaps if you'd had some time," he begins awkwardly. This isn't a situation he is comfortable handling. Angel had loved Buffy in much the same manner as he had loved Angel, Wesley knows, and that is something entirely too strange and unhappy to consider.

She grimaces. "Hey, Wes? That's not comforting."

"Ah. Right," he says. He is silent for a moment, unsure of how to act around Buffy-particularly now that their only common ground lay rotting in a well-appointed coffin. "It is rather ironic. In a terribly depressing sort of way."

They stand facing the grave. It would have been easier to cremate the body, really, but Wesley couldn't quite bring himself to reduce the former vampire to ashes. It wouldn't have been right to bury Angel as dust when he had wanted so desperately to die a human death.

A smooth tombstone marks the body of a warrior. Wesley had briefly considered creating a last name for him so as to avoid any questions, but that, too, seemed a sort of betrayal.

Instead, it simply reads:

ANGEL JANUARY 19, 2007 SALVATION IS CREATED

Wesley never saw his own epitaph, though he is not certain he would want to. Given his mental state at that point in time, he is rather afraid as to what it may have said. He has an inkling that it may have closely resembled this:

WESLEY WYNDAM-PRYCE FEBRUARY 8, 1970 - MAY 19, 2004 HE USUALLY ATTEMPTED TO DO THE RIGHT THING

"He died on my birthday," Buffy muses, "That's ironic."

Wesley keeps his gaze locked to the ground. The true irony was that Angel had been on his way to see her. She would never know that.

"Twenty-six. I'm twenty-six," she says, sounding surprised.

The corner of his mouth quirks up at this sudden proclamation. "Good for you."

She shakes her head vigorously. "No, it's just that-I never thought I'd make it this long. You were a Watcher, you know that Slayers don't-they aren't supposed to live for twenty-six years."

"No, they're not." This topic makes him distinctly uncomfortable. He doesn't like to be reminded of a time when he was callous enough to throw away the lives of girls like Buffy, girls unwillingly sacrificed to a war of which they knew nothing. For a long time, Wesley had relied on the ends justifying his often ruthless means.

 _If this is what the end looks like_ , he thinks, standing over the dead embodiment of his mission, _none of it was worthwhile._

* * * * *

2010

He meets her again in Chicago. It is a Saturday in late December, and the streets are lined with people heading home from an evening of shopping. They hold hands and laugh and give generously to homeless men they would have walked briskly past on any other day. Wesley roams the aisles of a convenience store, occasionally picking items off the shelves. A half gallon carton of milk, a can of peas, a loaf of wheat bread, and a bottle of whiskey. He sincerely hopes that the measure of a man can not be taken by his groceries, because he would almost certainly be found lacking.

The cashier is a young woman with long, dark hair and rather large breasts that Wesley pointedly tries not to notice. "Merry Christmas," she says brightly as she hands him his receipt and tosses the end of her bright red hat back behind her.

Wesley blinks. "Yes. Um. Merry Christmas to you, too," he says. It is odd, he thinks, that he bothers with such niceties when he needn't actually be polite to anyone. He had discovered years ago that an authentic British accent automatically implies courteousness and civility to the vast majority of Americans.

He picks up the bag of groceries and heads out the door, the bell chiming behind him and ushering him back into the bitter cold. Two blocks to his walk-up one bedroom flat feels like a mile in this wind.

Really, the only thing he misses about Los Angeles is the weather. The rain and the constantly grey, gritty landscape of Chicago reminds him rather uncomfortably of home-though Chicago, of course, is far colder.

The cold creeps up around his exposed neck and settles somewhere in his chest.

Wesley has never cared for Christmas. His father had more or less refused to acknowledge the holiday, and his friends-on those pitifully rare occasions when he had them-had always been busy with other, more pressing things. Namely, saving the world. He supposes that if he tried, he could recall every gift he has ever received for Christmas.

He also supposes that it should make him happy to see the world he helped save so many times. Mostly, it just seems a shame that those who made this world don't truly get to live in it. Those few who remain alive still carry the weight of the world on their bruised shoulders.

With his heavy grocery bag held precariously in one arm, Wesley opens the door to his apartment, cursing himself for leaving it unlocked. Statistics scroll through the back of his mind. Chicago has the highest per capita murder rate in the States-a fact he finds particularly appalling after spending seven years in Los Angeles.

A rail-thin woman stands in the shadows of his nearly empty kitchen. He thinks it may have worked out better for him if it had been a murderer. "What brings you to Chicago?" he asks, placing the grocery bag on his kitchen counter.

Buffy looks at him, an expression of the utmost seriousness on her face. "The weather."

He smiles and exhales a breath that is almost a laugh. "I see your sarcasm is still firmly intact." That, at least, is something.

"I guess some things never change," she says lightly. "Like you. Move two thousand miles away for a new job and you're still Research Guy. You're just a lot less...stuffy." Her appreciative gaze is not lost on him.

"I'm a bit old for you," he says, only half-joking.

Buffy grins playfully. "Nah. You're only like fifteen years older than me."

"Hardly," Wesley scoffs as he does the math. "Eleven."

"Big difference." Silence falls, thick as all the blood spilled between them.

He sits down on his worn leather couch and gestures for her to join him. "How did you find me?" he asks finally.

"Oh, please," she says, taking her place on the other end of the couch. "'Wyndam-Pryce' isn't exactly common."

"Then perhaps I should start with a more difficult question," he says, bracing himself for the answer. "Buffy, what are you doing here?"

She meets his eyes and then looks away, shrugging. "I don't know," she admits. "It just gets lonely sometimes. And okay, we never really liked each other, but we're all that's left."

"So you thought you'd stop by to wish me a happy Christmas?"

"No," she says quietly. "I thought it would be easier to forget with someone who remembers."

This doesn't particularly surprise him. The only surprise is that the idea doesn't entirely appall him. He shifts uncomfortably. Office romances never went well in their line of work, he knows, and even now that said work is done, he can't imagine that any good would come of being with Buffy. Except perhaps a brief respite from loneliness, and that, he thinks, may be the one thing worth such a risk. Buffy moves closer to him and touches the side of his face too gently. Her touch feels too much like a lover's and he wants desperately to move away. "Buffy, this probably isn't a good idea," he says, a weak protest against a less than undesirable fate.

She brushes her thumb along his jawline and stares at him, unrelenting. "None of it was." She moves to sit astride him, her legs bent beneath her on either side of Wesley's. "We did it anyway, though." Her lips meet his, and any gentleness disappears as they lose themselves in lips and tongues and teeth. The salty warmth of their blood mingles and burns. He wonders at the effect her blood must have had on Angel. They break apart just long enough to breathe. She whispers, "We had to," and Wesley doesn't think she is speaking to him.

* * * * *

2011

Wesley is tired of falling asleep with silhouettes, and he despises the shadows cast on the whitewashed walls of his apartment by friends long dead. More than these familiar ghosts, though, he hates the sweaty heat of strange bodies in his bed; hates the sharp ringing of their moans or their screams. Neither the living nor the dead hold any relief for him.

Buffy meets him halfway: she is little more than an echo of times that were both worse and infinitely more satisfying than the present; yet her ghost has warm hands and a bony body that leaves an imprint on his mattress.

She is wrapped up in the sheets, five feet and three inches of muted sunlight with her hair splayed across the pillow. He sits up drowsily, pulls on his boxers, and Lilah appears, expected and not entirely unwelcome.

"Hello, Wes," she says cheerfully. "You don't seem too surprised to see me. Though I guess you wouldn't be. You see me every night."

Wesley raises an eyebrow. The woman standing before him is rather a different breed from the angry, distraught Lilah that visits him in dreams. "I'm not sure I understand," he says carefully.

"I'm the real thing, Wes." She takes his hands in hers. "See? Cold and, more importantly, corporeal. Your Lilah can't touch."

"And how would you know that?"

"One of the advantages of being dead. I know everything you do, everything you think...'living vicariously' takes on a whole new dimension in Hell. I know all your darkest desires," and there she goes with her predatory grin again, "actually, I lived most of them. That's what I'm here about, actually."

"You weren't sent by the senior partners?"

"Are you kidding? They don't even know I'm here. With all the chaos you guys caused down in Hell, it's not hard for a minion like me to slip through the cracks." She pauses dramatically. "No, Wes, I'm here for personal reasons."

"I can't imagine," he says wryly.

She nods towards Buffy. "That girl over there? She's falling in love with you. Did you know that?" The surprise on his face makes it obvious that he hasn't, in fact, considered the possibility. _That's my boy_ , she thinks, _clueless to the last_. "I didn't think so. But you know, having been in that position before-in several of those positions, actually-I feel a little bad for the girl."

Wes recovers quickly-another one of Lilah's favorite things about him. "I didn't think you knew how to feel compassion."

She winces for effect. Death has disavowed her of the idea that he hates her, which renders his words more or less meaningless. "Ouch. Nah, I'm not big on compassion, but I do have a soft spot for girls who fall in love with you. Except Fred. I never liked her." Lilah steps closer to him so that her mouth is inches from his ear. She wants to make sure he understands every word. "Her soul really was destroyed, you know," she begins, and she feels him shiver from the cold of her words and her artificial breath. "When you dream, I can see you. She can't-but I guess that's how it's always been. I still know you best."

This is truth in its entirety, and he knows it, and she knows that the truth won't inspire anger in him. It did once, but the years have taken the edge off of his desperation. He glances back at Buffy, still sleeping soundly under the sheets. "She doesn't have any more illusions about this relationship than you did."

"Yeah, but that doesn't mean she's not hoping. Trust me." Lilah leaves Wesley to run her fingers through Buffy's hair. "Don't worry, though, she knows why you're with her."

"And why's that?" As always, he can't seem to resist playing her games. 

"Because she's the only thing left that reminds you of Angel."

The amusement drains from his face rapidly, leaving him pale and vulnerable. "Yes," he says, and his voice is cold and robotic. "I suppose that-yes. She is."

"I'm sorry," Lilah says, sounding almost genuine. "I know you don't like to think about it."

"It doesn't do much good to dwell on the impossible."

The hurt hasn't gone from his face, and it doesn't give Lilah the pleasure it should have. She finds herself wanting to soothe it away. "I don't hate you, you know."

"Should you?"

"Probably. I mean, you did dump me and then decapitate my corpse." She unties her scarf, revealing the still unhealed wound. He doesn't look away from it. "No, unfortunately for me, I was as in love with you as Buffy's going to be."

"I never pretended to love you."

"No," she says calmly, "you didn't."

"I did care about you, Lilah. I didn't want you to end like this. I tried-"

"I know, Wes," and now she sounds like the Lilah he usually sees, a little angry, a little exasperated, a little in love with him. "But let's face it-no matter what I say, you'll never forgive yourself for the way you treated me, and that's really okay with me, but it's not why I'm here."

"Then do tell me, so I can get on with my life," he says, though part of him wishes she would stay. A part of him always wishes she would stay.

"That's the thing, Wes. This isn't a life. We don't get you down here for a damn long while yet, so you might as well just get on with it and let yourself like the poor girl. You're both going to die anyway."

"Thanks for that," he says, amused in spite of himself. She always seems to have that effect on him.

She dissolves into the air without another word, and he knows he won't remember her visit in the morning.

* * * * *

Chicago August 2013

Wesley is amazed by how good things have gotten. He and Buffy have, against all odds, managed to create a relatively normal life for themselves.

During the day, everything is perfect. He makes coffee in the mornings, which they drink silently before one of them leaves for work. They get home early in the evening and curl up on their cheap corduroy couch, watch television for a while.

It's a lovely illusion, really.

As it always does, though, night falls and illuminates all of the truths that the sunlight didn't dare discern. It is only at night when they are forced to remember who they are and why they are together in the first place. And none of it is good.

He is lonely and needy and needing-her.

Wesley is an addict by nature, and she is far too willing to feed his addictions.

Neither one of them sleeps well and it gets harder every night to prepare for the next morning's charade, and his fears are realized one steamy August evening.

She packs and he watches for a while till he can't stand it and one word etches itself into the thick clammy air. "Why?" he asks, a simple question with a far more complicated answer.

Buffy doesn't take her eyes off of her suitcase as she continues to pack. "Because I can't handle this anymore, it's too painful. You see through me too easily and damn you, I need my privacy. I need to be alone for a while. I just-I'm sorry."

As the door slams behind her he says softly, "No you're not."

But she doesn't go far, just to a friend's house a few blocks down Sheridan. Close enough that her routine doesn't change much--same grocery store, same bars, same El stop to get to work.

It surprises her and no one else when she sees him in the checkout line of a convenience store a few blocks from his apartment. He shoots one dark poisoned glance at her. His eyes are bruises, black and blue, wounded and tender. His hair is longer now and unkempt, black matted strands hanging over his face and contrasting sharply with it-has he always been this pale?

When she doesn't meet his gaze he flinches, just barely. He is covered with scars from ruthless hands, fingernails, bullets, and betrayals. Scar tissue can't feel pain.

He still thinks he is burning when he sees her.

She hasn't been able to sleep at all since she left because the nightmares didn't stay with Wesley as she'd hoped, and without him to rouse her from dreams she finds herself waking up most often to the sound of her own screaming. 

The heavyset man behind the counter glances down at the Jack Daniels that has just been set down on the white Formica surface. "Hey, man, I thought you gave that shit up."

He shrugs, heavily. "It's been a rough week."

"How's your girlfriend?"

"Gone," he says simply.

The bells chime as he walks out the door, and Buffy knows he isn't coming back.

* * * * *

Los Angeles November 2016

This is the one place that has not been repaired.

After the apocalypse, there was a rush of rebuilding-Wesley thinks of it as erasing the evidence. Everyone rebuilt their lives, their homes, their families, carefully leaving behind no trace of the things they had lost.

Then, of course, there were those who could not rebuild because they had lost everything; those whose lives were too intimately wrapped up in the fight, in the battles that everyone else took for granted.

Wesley finds it oddly appropriate that this place remains as it was-frozen in time. The people who saw what happened here and survived have not been able to rebuild. They remain as stagnant, lonely, and broken as this empty room.

Lonely, but never entirely alone.

She walks up next to him. When she was younger, her graceful, predatory stride never knocked a single pebble out of place. In those days, he was often surprised to turn and see her standing behind him.

That skill, like most everything else, has faded with time.

"I was wondering if you would be here," she says softly.

He doesn't move any closer, doesn't reach out to touch her. "I thought that today-that perhaps today you might not want to be alone, all things considered."

"You thought right." She turns to face him, and tosses him a smile that more closely resembles a grimace. "I didn't think you'd remember," she says, and he can hear the rest of her thought: _No one else does_.

"It isn't the kind of thing that's easy to forget."

 _No_ , she thinks, _it isn't_. For years afterwards she couldn't sleep without dreaming of it, couldn't think about it without vomiting. Of all the things she had done, nothing had quite compared to the abject horror of watching his body writhe in agony from the wounds she had inflicted. The knife held in her white-knuckled hand didn't reflect his pale skin or the expression on his face, for which Buffy was grateful.

It shocks her, the kinds of things for which she is grateful.

They stand side by side in silence as she examines him. Nothing much has changed: leather jacket, jeans, dark hair, and sky-blue irises that mask the darkness beyond them. She'd resented it sometimes, that his eyes were so much lighter than hers.

Buffy remembers when silence used to be so awkward-they had thrown words around, desperately searching for something real to say. This silence is born of ease and habit-after spending ten years saying nothing, the quiet has become a comfort instead of a curse.

As all comforts do, though, Buffy expects that it will soon disappear.

* * * * *

"Where are you staying?" Wesley asks, reluctantly breaking the silence.

She responds absently, "Ramada Inn. Next to the airport." She sounds like a computer, she thinks. Or like a Buffybot. And there-more white-hot pinpricks in her heart. "I'm glad you're here." _Here is good_ , she decides. The lights of the city would be bright enough to chase away the night-bound creatures that haunt her nightmares.

He sighs. "I'm glad to have found you." He turns toward her, but she stares resolutely away. "It gets lonely, you know, being alone. I've looked for you."

"I've gotten good at hiding," Buffy says. _Not good enough_. Or maybe, she reconsiders, just good enough. Enough to know when she wants to be found.

"I can drive you back, if you'd like," Wesley offers, and she knows that when they get there he won't invite himself up to her room, because politeness is one of the few pretenses he has bothered to maintain. She also knows that he'll end up in her bed all the same, hungover and scarred and full of questions that she won't want to answer but will anyway.

They're coming together just to fall apart again, but then, Buffy is used to that.

* * * * *

Both the liquor and the casual conversation have long since run dry, and Wesley is finally drunk enough to ask her, safe in the knowledge that she's drunk enough to answer. "You know," he says, words only slightly slurred, "I'm still not entirely sure why you left."

She shrugs. "Because you were using me."

"No, I wasn't." He thinks he should sound more defensive at this, but he can't quite work up the energy. Besides, they both know she isn't wrong--neither is he, when it comes down to it.

"Maybe not at the end. But you did, for a long time. And even at the end-I was never who you wanted."

"Of course not. The person I wanted most is long dead."

She nods, unsurprised.

He looks at her thoughtfully. "But I'm not," he says, with more conviction in his voice than he thought he still possessed.

"You are good with the clichés," she says.

He lets this go. "You know I wasn't using you, Buffy, at least not any more than you used me," and she winces at the truth of this, because she doesn't like the way it sounds. She doesn't use people. She didn't use Wesley and she didn't use-Spike. He continues, "Why did you leave?" He thinks he sounds rather like her Watcher again-a mix of affection, condescension, and ruthlessness-and that alone will get him an answer.

"It was too much, Wes," she says, leaning into the couch. "You couldn't just leave it alone. You wouldn't let me forget."

"You never forgot," he says harshly. "I heard you at night, _every_ night, and I never so much as mentioned it in the day because I knew you didn't want me to."

"It wasn't anything you _did._ You were just this walking reminder of everything I wanted to leave behind. And I thought maybe if I left you, I could leave all of those ghosts there with you, and not have to feel anything anymore."

"Did it work?"

"No." She smiles at him apologetically. "Turns out you were the least of my problems."

"I doubt that very much."

* * * * *

They retreat to their rooms sometime around one a.m. Wesley doesn't bother to look for a clock, because he's not entirely certain he would be able to interpret it. He was going to have a hell of a hangover.

The phone rings, a shrill, painful sound that exacerbates the throbbing at his temples. He picks up the phone. "Hello?"

"Wesley," Buffy says, her bright voice muffled by alcohol and phone lines. "Let's get out of here. Let's go somewhere-away."

"Neither of us is in any state to drive," he points out. He recalls that he had ridden once in a vehicle driven by Buffy, and that it had been a singularly terrifying experience. He has no desire to find out how well she dodges pedestrians and buildings while intoxicated.

"Then we'll take a cab and go to the airport. I've never been to Minnesota; we could go there. I bet it's pretty this time of year. Snow and trees and football fans...how about it?"

The urgency in her voice bewilders him. "Buffy, why are you doing this?"

"Because he's here," she whispers. "They're all here. God, Wes, it's like they're in the walls and in the air and I can't be in this city anymore, not after everything that happened. The nightmares are bad enough but being in L.A. it feels like they never _end._ Let's go back to Chicago or something, just...let's leave. We can't make a life here. This city is dead and I don't want to be. Let's go."

"Of course," he says. "I'll call a taxi."

* * * * *

Buffy grabs the cab driver by the shoulder. "Hey! Stop here."

The driver, surprised by her abrupt movements, obliges and pulls to the side of the road.

She takes Wesley's hand and pulls him out of the back seat. "Buffy, where are we going?" he asks, trying to keep up with her as she runs to the highest point of the bridge.

Buffy puts her hand in his and points. "Look at this," she whispers, awestruck. "Look at all of the lights, all of the people. They look happy from up here, don't they?" She smiles at him. "I haven't seen the city like this in forever. It's all shiny and bright and...alive. _Look at it_ , Wes. This is the world we made."

"They're still here, Buffy," he reminds her. "This world isn't perfect."

She is resolved. "It doesn't have to be." She turns to him, squeezes his hand. "You said it before. We aren't dead yet. And we shouldn't be, because this is ours. Maybe this is the last fight for us. Maybe it will all be okay," she says, and he wants to believe her.

Wesley closes his eyes and she kisses him, there on that bridge that may as well have been the edge of the world. Her lips are chapped from the cool November wind, but they still taste sweet and feel soft against his lips and the side of his face, and suddenly it isn't so cold out anymore. She kisses him, and for a moment the warmth of her small, still-powerful body pressed against his feels suspiciously like destiny. Then he reminds himself that destiny has never been anything but cruel to either of them, has never provided any sort of respite. Fate, he knows, had no hand in the heat of hers.

He opens his eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Fairfax in the Angel Book of Days Spring Challenge. Prompt: Wesley; Genre ~ Future/Past/AU ~ Buffy
> 
> Author's notes ~ Hey, witness me being a week late and still sucking. I wrote this story in chunks, which is woefully apparent. Thanks to Sam for the quick (and multiple) betas. I decided around one o'clock this morning that present tense was a big failure of an experiment, but it was a bit late, so this is what you get. Though I may go back and fix it later. I'll stop making excuses now. Oh, and when I wrote this, all I knew of the finale was that Wes died. Didn't know about Angel signing away his Shanshu.


End file.
